Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday October 15, 2009 @02:41PM
from the not-so-much-into-liberty-y'see dept.

TechReviewAl writes "Technology Review reports that the Chinese government has for the first time targeted the Tor anonymity network. In the run-up to China's National Day celebrations, the government started targeting the sites used to distribute Tor addresses and the number of users inside China dropped from tens of thousands to near zero. The move is part of a broader trend that involves governments launching censorship crackdowns around key dates. The good news is that many Tor users quickly found a way around the attack, distributing 'bridge' addresses via IM and Twitter."

It's actually quite interesting what Chinese goverment is capable of on technical terms. Most of the goverments are quite clueless when it comes to computer and internet stuff, but Chinese seem to be on the track always.

It's actually quite interesting what Chinese goverment is capable of on technical terms. Most of the goverments are quite clueless when it comes to computer and internet stuff, but Chinese seem to be on the track always.

Indeed. If the UK tried this, not only would it not work, it would somehow leak all the troop and ship locations to everyone in the world, along with Gordon Brown's gay lover's telephone number.

It's actually quite interesting what Chinese goverment is capable of on technical terms. Most of the goverments are quite clueless when it comes to computer and internet stuff, but Chinese seem to be on the track always.

The Chinese government is capable because unlike most countries, it has to be. For countries like the U.S., Japan, and most European countries, the citizens are fairly free to go about their business without fear of government reprisal. So, these countries simply don't care (nor do they need to care) about the best ways to shut off their citizens' freedoms.

Other highly controlling countries, such as North Korea, have citizens who simply don't have access to these things to begin with, so there is no need to shut them off.

Gee, I could be mistaken, but I think he's saying all the non-violent offenders in our prisons should consider themselves lucky that we don't just execute them, since that's apparently the other option.

Or he could be saying that it's proper to compare the U.S. to oppressive theocratic regimes, rather than other Western democracies.

Or it's the "Hey, at least we're better than [insert the worst thing here]!" defense, which is a form of unintentionally damning with faint praise.

Other countries that are "less free" have lower incarceration rates. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, but its laws are nowhere near the harshest.

For example, Japan has a far lower incarceration rate despite its laws usually being stricter than the USA's. Those nonviolent drug offenders in the USA would be jailed in Japan as well. But the population doesn't do drugs as much, and the police are probably not as good at catching them be

Right. Because the US is all the way down to number 4 in the number of executed prisoners per year by country.

For some, being ostracized would be a very severe punishment.

So like the sex offender registry?

You're also making some specious claims about the deterrent effect of harsh punishments. 20+ years of the war on drugs should be ample evidence that just ratcheting up punishments does not necessarily lead to fewer offenders. And US punishments across the board are almost all more severe than their european counterparts. Why doesn't France or Norway have a hi

You really think that most governments are clueless?Almost all the industrialized nations have access to experts that could block tor just as well.They don't do it because it is illegal to do it in those nations or they find it immoral to do.I always thought it funny that people thought that TOR was unstoppable by the Chinese or any other government.The elected officials may have limited knowlege of technology but they don't handle the details they give the orders.

If Japan's citizens did not want to be nuked, then they should have stopped their government from killing millions of Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asian neighbors. They started the killing; then they reaped what they had sowed.

Do I feel sorry they Japanese had to die? Yes. Do I think there was any other choice? No. When someone points a gun at you, you don't hold up a target to help them aim better. You fire back.

If Japan's citizens did not want to be nuked, then they should have stopped their government from killing millions of Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asian neighbors. They started the killing; then they reaped what they had sowed.

While it may have ended up as some perverse National Karma, I sincerely doubt the U.S. nuked Japan in order to help the other Asian nations.

But they had two bombs! And they were different designs! You can't drop one without the other, or how do you know that they are both capable of killing loads of civilians? And how would you decide which to drop?

You do realize that the bombs were dropped after the battles at Midway and the invasion and taking of Okinawa? Little Boy (Hiroshima) was dropped August 6, 1945, and Okinawa ended in June, 1945.

In other words, the war was effectively over. By the end of the battle of Okinawa, Allied victory in the Pacific was pretty much guaranteed. The Japanese lines had been broken, and the Allies had a strong foothold on Japanese soil. They most certainly did have a choice about whether or not to drop the nuclear bombs.

So... it's cool to hold Hiroshima (a 20th century massacre of civilians) against the US, but mention Nanking (a 20th century massacre against civilians) and suddenly we're in "no that was a loooooong time ago!!1!" territory, solely because it's Japan?

Furthermore, you should probably do a little research on:
a) Japans war with China
b) Japans request that we stop providing aid to China
c) why the U.S. placed an embargo on Japan
d) how that ties in to the bombing or Pearl Harbor.

Add a bit of general WWII history and then we can have an intelligent conversation about this topic

According to the famous documentary "Why We Fight", the Japanese branch of World War 2 started in 1931. So the invasion of China, Rape of Nanking, and final surrender of Japan were all part of that overall fight.

Unfortunately, the Japanese school system doesn't bother teaching children about all the horrible things the Japanese military did in the past. A lot of them simply don't know things like the Rape of Nanjing, the medical experiments on POWs, and so on even happened.

Even if it's true that the Japanese only fought against other countries' militaries and avoided civilian deaths (it's not), it's irrelevant. When you go to war, you go to war completely. Which means you kill every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country.

Don't want to do that? Don't go to war.

Besides, we killed more Japanese civilians with conventional weapons in any one air raid than we did with Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It wasn't the number of deaths that got the Emperor to take notice, it was the fact that we did it with just one bomb each time. The alternative was to invade the Japanese home islands, which, by conservative estimates, would've meant hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Japanese. Truman made the right call in dropping the bombs.

Even if it's true that the Japanese only fought against other countries' militaries and avoided civilian deaths (it's not), it's irrelevant. When you go to war, you go to war completely. Which means you kill every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country.

And people with mindset like that disgust me. But don't get me wrong, killing other people does too. But you're *not* going to shoot armless, defenseless people and even more so woman and children. Even if they belong to a country of your political enemy.

Another completely retarted fight and killing of people is the fight of Jerusalem and Israel stuff. They're killing thousands of people just to fight over some goddamn land.

I bet lots of people don't care because it doesn't really concern them and it's just

"But you're *not* going to shoot armless, defenseless people and even more so woman and children. Even if they belong to a country of your political enemy."Japan did in mass.Really read about the rape of Nanjing or how they treated the Koreans.

The problem is they are NOT "helpless innocent" as I will point out from a tale my great uncle told me about WW2. He was one of those crossing into Germany when Goebbels had pumped everyone up with that "fight to the last" BS. He said he was talking with the guy next to him in the jeep when the whole back of the guy's head came off, splattering him with brains. He saw where the flash had come from and opened up with his BAR. When they got to where the sniper was they found it was an 8 month pregnant woman, still clutching the rifle in her hands.

I asked him "did it bother you to have killed a pregnant woman? and he said "Hell no. I had already lost more friends over there than I could count. It was obvious to anyone with eyes that the war was lost for Germany and those crazy bastards just kept fighting. And I had decided I was gonna go home on my feet and NOT in a body bag."

And let us not forget the Japanese had this little thing called Kamikaze [wikipedia.org] and I'm sure would have had NO problems with getting men, women, AND kids to be used as human cannon fodder in an attack on the mainland. Just look at the amount of casualties we suffered on Okinawa [wikipedia.org] and multiply that several times over for an invasion of the mainland. So while I am sorry civilians died from the bombs, the death count would have probably been even worse with a full scale invasion, and of course by that point it was pretty clear even to the most optimistic leaders in Japan that they had lost. They could have surrendered but THEY chose to continue the fight.

So I'm sorry, but the American military needed to worry about keeping American soldiers alive, not how many casualties the enemy that refused to surrender would take.

But you're a moron if you think the death of a man is of any less significance than the death of a woman or a child.

Actually, no. The death of a man IS less significant than the death of a woman or (female) child.

From a long-term standpoint, the destruction of an enemy lies in destroying their ability to reproduce as fast as your tribe/civilization. This is less true now, due to technology, than it was for the past ten or twenty thousand years. But killing women and children is the only way to really co

The idea of total war fare like that was not the norm in conflicts even 200 years ago. Perhaps some historian here can point out (I think it was the French revolution) when it became norm to mobilize all civilian in war making effect and therefore "justify" the opposite side to crush totally the infrastructure of the enemy.

Actually, I think even a cursory look at history would tell a different story. Probably because nation-states are a more recent development you have a larger definition of "total war", but in the era before the nation-state war was generally winner take all. There is a reason we have a definition for the word "sack" that includes the plundering, looting and destruction of a city. Take a quick google of "Carthage" for a better understanding of what the norm in conflicts was prior to the current era. The

When you go to war, you go to war completely. Which means you kill every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country.

Ah, I see you subscribe to the theory that war is a state of affairs completely separated from regular politics. It isn't. It's merely the pursuit of political goals with other means.

Here's what killing "every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country" nets you: eternal war, with one person left standing. You want to know why? Because for one, it is impossible to kill every man, woman and child in your enemy's country. More capable people than you have tried and failed. Furthermore, a country is not an

>>>It wasn't the number of deaths that got the Emperor to take notice, it was the fact that we did it with just one bomb each time.

That's not the end of the story. After the Emperor recorded his formal surrender, to be broadcast over radio to the Japanese people, the Army tried to kill their own leader. If the Japanese are willing to kill their own God-emperor, what would they be willing to do to keep the Americans from landing? They would fight to the last man - it would make our current war i

That's not the end of the story. After the Emperor recorded his formal surrender, to be broadcast over radio to the Japanese people, the Army tried to kill their own leader. If the Japanese are willing to kill their own God-emperor, what would they be willing to do to keep the Americans from landing? They would fight to the last man - it would make our current war in Afghanistan look easy.

Um, that wasn't "The Japanese", that was the top Generals and some of their loyalists who were concerned about their own careers and their own necks and most certainly did not consider their Emperor to be a God.

The rest of the country, including most of what remained of the Army, put down their arms and surrendered when the Emperor told them to.

Besides, as I explain in another reply, there were a number of other options Truman was considering and invasion was never a serious contender.

It wasn't the number of deaths that got the Emperor to take notice, it was the fact that we did it with just one bomb each time. The alternative was to invade the Japanese home islands, which, by conservative estimates, would've meant hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Japanese. Truman made the right call in dropping the bombs.

It's easy to transpose a specific ideology onto history if one does not actually look at said history with its full complexity and inherent ambiguities.

The estimate of hundreds of thousands of lives lost was created after the end of the war to justify dropping the bombs. No, seriously, go look it up.

The vast majority of urban infrastructure was already destroyed, many estimates placed Japanese capitulation just weeks later if the bombs had not been dropped. The civilian population was training to fight of

Besides, we killed more Japanese civilians with conventional weapons in any one air raid than we did with Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It wasn't the number of deaths that got the Emperor to take notice, it was the fact that we did it with just one bomb each time.

Indeed.

The alternative was to invade the Japanese home islands, which, by conservative estimates, would've meant hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Japanese. Truman made the right call in dropping the bombs.

While that is the simplified history, it doesn't really represent the real choice that was being made.

I once read a transcript of one of Truman's cabinet meetings shortly before the end of the war, when they were deliberating on what to do. It was actually a pretty fascinating read.

While they were obviously considering every option, and the Department of War had drawn up detailed plans for a possible invasion (which is where the estimate above comes from) it's clear that Truman and his advisers were not seriously considering it at that point. They knew Japan was on the ropes and surrender was inevitable without needing to set foot on the island. With the Japanese navy serving as fish condos, there was nothing they could do to fight back or even feed themselves.

The main options under discussion were:

1 - Drop the bomb on multiple Japanese cities, multiple being important so as to suggest that we could continue doing so ad-infinitum rather than it being a one-off, forcing an unconditional surrender.

2 - Drop the bombs in the ocean as a demonstration. The biggest concern here was that they would not be suitably impressed or think it was somehow a trick, and then we wouldn't have enough to implement option 1.

3 - Wait for the Russians to get involved. Truman and his advisers were convinced that once Russia declared war, Japan would quickly surrender. The big problem here was that we wanted them to surrender just to us, not to the Russians. Cold War politics had already started to enter the picture, and we were "Allies" in name only.

4 - Accept conditional surrender. The Japanese had already made an offer to surrender, but due to communication problems the actual terms of this surrender were unknown. Certainly anything that allowed the Japanese to wage war again was completely unacceptable. It turns out all they really wanted was to retain a ceremonial role for the Emperor to save face, something which General MacArthur wisely gave them anyway. But at the time of the discussion, they didn't know. In any case, it was decided that no matter what the terms, nothing less than complete unconditional surrender would do for the enemy who had initiated the war.

Which is basically why the actual invasion was off the table. It was unnecessary in any event, and by the time it could have been implemented, Russia would have been involved and we would have been dealing with a joint surrender in any case.

By the way, my point isn't to second guess Truman. It was a difficult decision with no good options as you say, and as another poster mentioned he wasn't really aware of the impact the bomb would have in terms of radiation sickness etc. I don't think anyone really understood. Neither is my point to say with the benefit of hindsight that it was the wrong decision. I can't speak for the Japanese, but I have to imagine they were better off surrendering to us than ending up with a North Japan/South Japan situation.

My point is that the situation was much more complicated than the simple moral calculus implied by "drop the bombs and kill 200,000, or invade and kill millions". The real decision was not that clear-cut, and I think it dose a disservice both to the people who made it, and to ourselves in our efforts to learn from history, to pretend that it was.

They also ran Unit 731, conducted horrible experiments and vivisections on civilians and prisoners of war, butchered their own schoolchildren out of fears the invading enemy would be as brutal as they are, cannibalized Australians and live in a culture of institutionalized racism to this very day.

Man, historical revisionism is AWESOME! *beats off to 2chan instead of going outside*

Given Russian actions in Eastern Europe one could argue that it was better to absorb two nuclear bombs and wind up occupied by the United States than it would have been to be sliced in half with a large portion of your population at the mercy of Stalin and his army of rapists [dailymail.co.uk].

But Americans had to show off too (as Cold War was already kind of starting), so they launched those nukes.

It seems to me that you should produce some evidence to substantiate such an outlandish claim.

According to the famous documentary "Why We Fight", the Japanese branch of World War 2 started in 1931. So the invasion of China, Rape of Nanking, and the Pacific war were all part of that overall fight.

And a lot of Chinese, Filipinos, and other occupied Asian nations cheered when Japan fell in 1945. They were just as much celebrating victory as we were.

No. Its a case of historical ignorance on your part. America was going to war with Japan irregardless of Pearl Harbor. The only thing Pearl Harbor did was push up the timetable. It was already planned to take on Japan due to their invasion of our allies in the Philippines and other nations in south east Asia once we had finished with Germany.

The purpose of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to show the emperial cultists that they would die horrific deaths with no honor, to deny them the glory of their bushido death

That's poppycock. USA went to war with Japan over influence in the Asian mainland.

Pearl Harbor was the justification, but the US had been waging economic war for some time, prompted primarily by the Japanese actions toward, and invasion of, China.

Key aspect: Japan was dependent upon the US nearly 100% for its oil. Without oil, they could not hope to continue waging war on the mainland... so when the US enmbargoed the Japanese in 1941, it lead directly to Pearl Harbor.

The US went to war when we where attacked that is true but the US was supporting China and England before Pearl Harbor.The US sold China the best fighters that the US had in service at the time the P-40, they where embargoing Japan for the war in China, and members of the US military where fighting in China as "Volunteers" as the Flying Tigers just like they where in England in the Eagle Squadron. Also a US Gunboat in China was attacked before Perl Harbor as well.As to the Filipinos the was a US territory

So if you point a gun at me, I can hunt down and disintegrate your entire family tree?

That's what total war is. Every resource of the nation-state is poured into the war effort. Every resource of the nation-state becomes a valid target.

Take that to it's logical extreme: if a citizen of a foreign country kills someone in America, we have the right to nuke that person's homeland, because they started the killing.

That's not the "logical conclusion". That's a straw man that you set up.

It's a matter of intent, participation, and scale. It's ludicrous to assume that everyone in Japan supported the alliance with the Germans or even the war in general

Why is that relevant?

And don't forget we are talking about an action undertaken with full knowledge of the fact that it would kill hundreds of thousands of helpless civilians

You mean after we gave them months of warnings that they should evacuate their cities?

at a time when Japan's war machine was already decimated, and the allied forces were merely trying to force an official surrender so they could occupy a country which posed no further military threat.

No further military threat? Ask the 12,500 dead Allied soldiers on Okinawa if the Japanese still posed a military threat. Ask the hundreds of thousands that were expected to die during Operation Downfall if they still posed a military threat. Then consider the alternative to invasion (continuing the economic blockade) and ask yourself how many millions of Japanese civilians would have starved to death.

If you think that there are NO countries, signatories or not, that would violate the shit out of the Geneva Convention should it suit their purposes; you are more than ridiculous; you are criminally naive.

The conventions never applied to signatories who were fighting adversaries that refused to follow them. Given the Japanese treatment of prisoners and the fact that their soldiers would often use white flags as cover to get close enough to kill our troops [wikipedia.org], I'd say that they forfeited whatever protections the civilized world had previously agreed to.

For one thing - the purple hearts awarded throughout WW2 were ordered before each campaign or major action. The bean counters got really, really accurate when estimating how many to order. They seldom missed by more than a couple percent. Look it up, google is your friend.

The estimated number of purple hearts required for an invasion of the Japanese homeland was 1/4 million. The medals were ordered, and plans were progressing. The allies knew we were about to sacrifice those 1/4 million men.

Then, the bombs fell. Japan surrendered. Those 1/4 million purple hearts are STILL being used today. Casualties from every single conflict that we've been involved in are wearing medals that were intended for the invasion of Japan.

And, that 1/4 million is ONLY American casualties. Estimates for Japanese casualties? Look 'em up. You'll be amazed. Nope, I'm not going to spoil the surprise.

The rest of your post is just as ridiculous. Japan would never have been "contained" in 1945. Fanatical supporters of the Emperor were still coming out of the hills in the 1970's. Contain? Yeah, right.

The estimated number of purple hearts required for an invasion of the Japanese homeland was 1/4 million. The medals were ordered, and plans were progressing. The allies knew we were about to sacrifice those 1/4 million men.

No, they weren't. Truman was never seriously considering invasion when deliberating on how to end the war. Him, his cabinet and advisers, and all his generals were convinced that Japan would surrender without invasion. In particular, they were sure that once Russia declared war on Japa

powerless to stop them (sound like any country you can think of these days?)

Nope. Not at all.

You mean, powerless to stop it without any risk to themselves, without taking time out of their day, without having to learn about the issues involved.

So yeah, if saying "I didn't want this" while paying your taxes is the best you can do, maybe you should suck nuke... If you want to avoid it, control your military - use a gun locally to avoid sending a soldier overseas needlessly.

>>>So if you point a gun at me, I can hunt down and disintegrate your entire family tree?

If my family is building guns/bullets that I am using to kill-off your wife, your daughter, your parents, and so on...... then yes I think you have every right to stop them. If you can't find me, then you kill my suppliers so I don't have anything to fire.

According to LOAC, you could target their bullet-building factory (home?) and if they are inside, then that's tough luck. But you can't directly target them under current international law.If they tried building another factory/house, you (you are a country, right??) could occupy their territory, imposing martial law, and send to jail any non-combatants that aided the enemy. But you can't just shoot then w/o trial for making ammo them unless they become unlawful

The firebombs that Britain used in Germany were FAR more deadly than the 2 nukes the USA dropped. The nukes killed a few thousand, while the firebombs killed hundreds of thousands. Example: It is said the fires in Dresden raged so fiercely that the oxygen was sucked out of the air, and people suffocated to death. They just fell dead whereever they were - in bed, hiding in basements, running down the street.

To me it seems odd to single-out two bombs, while ignoring the millions of other bombs that had

Those nukes we're intentionally made to kill civilians and destroy normal cities - not to attack against military targets.

Your "few thousands" killed is a 'little' bit off too;

The bombs killed as many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945,[4] with roughly half of those deaths occurring on the days of the bombings. Amongst these, 15–20% died from injuries or the combined effects of flash burns, trauma, and radiation burns, compounded by illness, malnutrition and radiation sickness.[5] Since then, more have died from leukemia (231 observed) and solid cancers (334 observed) attributed to exposure to radiation released by the bombs.[6] In both cities, most of the dead were civilians.[7][8][9]

The Dresden bombing wasn't really a military target either. Most of the industrial infrastructure was outside of the city, but the firebombing was concentrated on the centre. Estimated dead there were 135,000 to 500,000; more than at Nagasaki, probably more than Hiroshima, and possibly more than both combined.

Not to justify the nuclear bombings, but they weren't the only atrocities committed by the 'good guys' in World War II. It's only in comparison to the Nazi extermination camps that the winners ma

To me it seems odd to single-out two bombs, while ignoring the millions of other bombs that had been dropped from 1939 through 45. Those non-nukes also killed people, including innocent girls and boys that didn't deserve to die but were caught in the middle of the fight. War is hell, no matter if you use nukes or TNT.

It's not odd to single them out. After all, no weapon anything like them had ever been unleashed. Even previous weapons that had changed the face of warfare -- the longbow, cannons, machine g

So if you point a gun at me, I can hunt down and disintegrate your entire family tree? Is that the policy you're advocating here? Take that to it's logical extreme: if a citizen of a foreign country kills someone in America, we have the right to nuke that person's homeland, because they started the killing.

Your logic is not extreme enough. Nuke his home planet! He is the same carbon based life form that caused the problem in the first place.

Are you aware of the term 'Total War' and how it applies to WWII? Yes, the US did horrible things during WWII, I'm not saying they didn't and I'm not saying that it was right. But to argue that Japan posed 'no further military threat' is shortsighted and, quite frankly, revisionist.

The people in power of Japan at that time had a history of war crimes and human rights abuses, including but not limited to: the murder of "6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese" prisoners of war,

of course nuking anything is a horrible evil, but you can't examine that horrible evil in a vacuum of context. all other choices were much worse horrible evils

Well, KILLING people is horrible but sometimes unavoidable. That fact that it was done with a nuke is morally neutral; it doesn't make it better or worse. Firebombing the cities with conventional weaponry wouldn't have been somehow better.

and the bomb was no worse then Japans [wikipedia.org] actions [wikipedia.org]

Ah, the "our actions were no worse than their actions" argument. So what does that make us, and how does it justify it? I would say that it wasn't any better either. I don't see how one country's atrocity justifies another country's atrocity. Moral relativism, at its finest.

We all agree that the Japanese did probably some of the most horrific shit any country could during WWII, but your argument implies that it was perfectly fine to nuke their civilians as well, most of whom had nothing to do with the atroc

It's not unusual for governments to devote their greatest abilities to the worst ends (see: Hiroshima, Japan).

Blame Einstein [dannen.com] for that one. Committed pacifist that he was he was still sufficiently afraid of the idea of Hitler having the bomb as to use his influence to get the United States to build one first.

In the alternate history "Fatherland" Hister builds the nuclear bomb first, and uses it, which ends World War 2. A cold war develops between Germany (occupying from Spain to the Ukraine) and the United States. Good book worth checking out.

It gives me hope to see how people can get around this sort of oppression, I am hoping that it stays that way, that we will always have the option of communicating with each other, that no corporation or government will strangle.I truly hope it stays that way.

There was just recently a slashdot article about Congress passing a law to allow them to monitor what passes through anonymous networks. Many of the EU states have similar capabilities. We look at China as an example of government censorship, but maybe we ought to look at our own homes as well.

I think China is bad, moving in a positive direction. Aging dictators, a colossal age gap, then a young generation who came up with grass mud horse, and will eventually topple the censorship.We're one dodgy ground at the moment, and moving in a negative direction. Internet freedom in the west is on the edge of the abyss.

There was just recently a slashdot article about Congress passing a law to allow them to monitor what passes through anonymous networks.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's about 50% child pornography, 25% copyright infringement, 15% trolling on sites that banned someone and 10% legitimate speech that has a valid need for anonymity. I ran a tor exit node for three days before I got curious enough to fire up wireshark and see what kind of traffic was passing through it. I shut it down after I discovered that the vast majority of it was child pornography being downloaded from servers in Eastern Europe.

I don't have a problem with tor existing. I've used it myself many times. I'm just not willing to support it with my network resources when child pornography makes up such a large portion of the traffic on the tor network.

Personally I would like to see someone design something like tor that would be limited to text based protocols like IRC, Usenet, etc. That would provide a channel of anonymous communication that could be deployed without sucking up as many resources as tor does and without supporting child pornography and copyright infringement. This would bring at least two benefits:

More people would be willing to run tor nodes because they wouldn't have to donate as much bandwidth

The network would be used for communication rather than bulk transfers of copyrighted works and/or child pornography.

Personally I would like to see someone design something like tor that would be limited to text based protocols like IRC, Usenet, etc.

You could set an exit policy to do just that, check the tor documentation. It might not stop other people from allowing Web traffic, but it would ensure people wouldn't be using your exit node for child porn. (Binary Usenet transfers or transfers over IRC aside.)

Hell, you could even limit what Web sites people can get to through your node. So you could still allow access to, say, Google and Wikipedia but no other sites.

Personally I would like to see someone design something like tor that would be limited to text based protocols like IRC, Usenet, etc. That would provide a channel of anonymous communication that could be deployed without sucking up as many resources as tor does and without supporting child pornography and copyright infringement.

Well, you can restrict the ports available on your exit node, such that only connections to NNTP or IRC services are available. Because nobody downloads cp on IRC or Usenet. It's n

Are you really so naive as to think that IRC and Usenet can only be used to transfer plain text? Ever hear of uuencoding (encoding binary data as base-64 text)? Some (old) SMTP systems are limited to 7-bit ASCII; that doesn't stop anyone from using them to transfer binary attachments.

All you've done is made the network less efficient, without limiting how it can be used.

A picture is worth 1000 words. What would the press value be of text statements about the Iranian protests compared to the value of a picture showing 100,000 people in the streets? If you restrict the anonymous networks to text only you destroy the press value. Pictures are the basis of modern press. The picture or video of the police beating someone has value, a text statement by an anonymous eyewitness is easily refuted by the authoritarian regime but the video or picture can't be refuted easily.

The problem with believing in free speech is you have to tolerate all speech. You are unwilling to tolerate all speech so you throw out all the value of the really important, possibly world changing, speech. To me it's called throwing out the baby with the bathwater but to each his own, but you aren't on the moral high ground you think you are.

I have no idea how much content on the network then actually was child pornography, but nearly all the main search/index pages had links claiming to be child porn.

And I was paying for bandwidth to host a node.

After a while I thought 'you know, I really do not need to be facilitating the distribution of this stuff. Whether it is or is not child porn I don't know and I'm not going to click to find out, but it's claiming to be, and that's way too squicky

to honestly sit here and put forth the idea that the level of censorship in the west is anything remotely near what china does, you've arrived at intellectual fail. the SCALE of the effort matters. if the west, for example, tries to find kiddie porn, it is entirely in your right to debate that effort and question its relevancy, effectiveness, and the direction of such laws

now, if you were to actually engage in such criticism in china, a nice young man or woman in one of the many banks of party loyalists who

China is simply the testing ground where they are working out all of the bugs with the hardware and software. When all of the censorship was happening in Iran around the time of the disputed elections, it came out that Nortel was working with the Iranian government to filter the internet traffic coming in and out of the country. It wouldn't surprise me if multi-national corporations weren't playing similar rolls in China's networking infrastructure. If not Nortel, then Cisco, or Juniper, or one of the ot

After reading the headline, I thought China was doing harm to my favorite book publisher. "How could they be a threat to China?" I wondered. "Sure some of their books are thought-provoking, but really!"

control freaks have at their psychological root a toxic amount of insecurity. the grumpy old men in beijing have to make sure society is "harmonious" even if that's nothing more than media shorthand for placid lies. the truth is often ugly, dissent is always ugly. but when you expose yourself to dissent and ugliness, you do nothing but strengthen your mind and your convictions and your bullshit detector. all china is doing with the massive amount of societal control is producing a generation of chinese minds that have nothing but cotton candy between the ears: unable to handle anything except the most stultifying of platitudes about the world and its nature, wilting at the slightest sign of trouble

china is supposed to be emerging world power? when chinese raised in the hermetically sealed climate controlled media environment of modern china interact with their compatriots from india, brazil, japan, usa, germany... what are these dunderheads going to be like? when they encounter the slightest bit of provocation or contrasting opinion to the almighty sense of "harmony" what are their social skills for that resistance? censor? ignore? run away?

a "harmonious society" seems nothing more to me than a way to ensure chinese minds in the generations to come are weak brittle minds incapable of understanding or processing criticism of any kind, because it's not "harmonious". "harmony": what a fucking bullshit codeword for "i'm insecure at the top, don't think anything that might make me feel threatened". this isn't about cultural differences, this is is about a colossal social weakness of modern china completely of chinese making, a society-wide achilles heel: "we can't handle criticism, cover your ears"

enjoy your cottonheaded future china, so sorry for my dissent. you can just ignore, dismiss, and censor me. that's obviously the best way to handle these words. pffffffft

What you say is true, in varying degrees for most every government I have ever read about. Not that I am anti government, anarchy isn't likely to get us anywhere fast. But people by and large the world over are afraid of unknowns, and will seek to shelter themselves and their progeny from the things that scare them. And of course there are plenty of power hungry asshats who will take advantage of any little power they are given to gain more by pandering to the masses in this regard.

I wrote a report on the Chinese drywall issue and free trade on my MBA class. The whole story include a German company and its manufacturing plant in China, one shipping company, one importer, several builders and house owners. If you forget those sensational news and dig into legal documents, you will find that the importer of the drywall in question failed to get customs documents for the dry wall in question. So those drywall were sitting on boats for as long as 6 months along Florida coast. This elo

I was posting in a Hong Kong (note: not the mainland) Linux user group forum the other day and advising someone to use dyndns.org. The string "dyndns.org" got filtered into ">>>
I didn't know dyndns is a threat in HK.

The Tor developers knew that it would be very easy for tyrannical regimes to download the directory list and block all the IPs in it, so they prepared for this by implementing bridge support about a year ago. The bridge model makes it very hard to block Tor. Technologyreview briefly mentions this. What really happened, and you can all go read more about this in the Tor blog at blog.torproject.org, is that what has happened the last few days is that the number of people using Tor-servers directly dropped to near zero while the number of people using bridges exploded. People simply switched to using bridges when they found that the Tor-network had been blocked.

Well, it is clear that the CCP is implementing a more strict online blocking and censoring policy, OCT.1 is just one example of those that is exposed to the outside world. 2009 also marks the 20th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square 4JUN1989, CCP instructed all website in China, to disable comment functions through out the country, majority of the websites complied and rest of the simply shut down the their website claim as 'maintenance' as a protest, it was the official 'Chinese website maintenance day'. I would expect such policy to carried out repeatedly in the future.
I am lucky enough to personally experience the internet, CCP style from Jun to Sep this year! Let me give you an example what it is like:
1st thing I get online I openned www.google.com and dare you search for anything, I really mean it, anything, you will be reset to death after click into page 2, 3 of the results if you are lucky not to be blocked immdieatly after click 'Google search' or 'I'm feeling not so lucky in China' button.
Google image search is worse, you are assured by the CCP to not see anything that is in anyway related to harm a harmonious society.
Youtube is certainly not working for like a year now, as long with victims such as blogger, worldpress,livejournal, facebook,twitter, basically anything that can help people find useful, uncensored information, or anything that can help 'words' getting around.
Picasa was among the laest victim of the GFW, I have about 7G of photo stored on it, which I cannot show or share with 1/4 of the world population. I rarely use flickr, but words are it was ultra-unusually unblocked by the GFW afetr I fled China before OTC.1, my assumption is the journalist all over the world flocked the OCT.1 ceremony may get very very angry when they find they cannot upload to flickr.
And when you just about to think can media freedom in China to be any worse? The answer is YES. Media censorship extents to movies, tvs, newspapers, almost anything you can think of!
The Summer Olympic Games was as much as freedom the CCP can give to foreigners, which CCP immediately took back after the event, followed by the unrest in Tibet and Urumqi, and Taiwan. It is very likely the conflict between those parts I mentioned to get worse in the near future, and the GFW will further enforced by the CCP as a way to maintain their one-party-ruling.